Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues

TWENTY-FIVE

I went home after talking to Jessica. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I mean, what can you do to follow up something like that? The Bronco sort of guided itself down Midnight Pass Road and onto the meandering drive to the carport. I got out and went up the stairs to my porch, where a cat’s cardboard travel case sat on my glass-top table, with faint mewing sounds coming from it.

Even before I peered through an air hole, I knew what was inside. The calico kitten was crouched in a bunny pose with her ears flattened and her eyes wide with anxiety. A note had been taped to the case, written in round girlish script on paper torn from a child’s school tablet.

Dixie,

I know you wanted the kitten so it is yours.

Your friend, Paloma.

I groaned. I didn’t want a kitten! I had merely been concerned about the kitten, not covetous about it. I opened the carrying case and lifted the kitten out. She really was cute.

“It’s okay, kitty, don’t be scared.”

Some stroking and soft talk make the kitten retract her little trimmed claws, and a bowl of cool water in the kitchen and more smoochy talk made her hunched shoulders relax. Then, knowing I would really need to pee if I’d been confined in a box and carried to a strange place, I carried her down to the big sandbox by the sea. She seemed to believe me when I told her the waves and seagulls wouldn’t hurt her. After she made a silver-dollar-sized puddle, I took her back upstairs, explaining as I went that while I thought she was the smartest and cutest kitten I’d ever seen in my life, I couldn’t keep her.

I said, “It’s just not in my life plan right now to have a pet.”

She licked my thumb with her little sandpapery tongue and purred.

I lay down in the hammock with the kitten on my stomach. She sat up with her front legs straight and looked around. A seagull flew by with a loud squawking sound and she raised one hairy eyebrow and made a little firping sound that made me laugh.

I said, “You know, I don’t even know your name.”

She made some more firping sounds.

I said, “You sound like Ella Fitzgerald when she does that skatting thing. If you were my kitty, I’d name you Ella Fitzgerald.”

She yawned and curled into a contented ball and fell asleep. I lay there with both hands cupped around the calico kitten and told myself I should get up and call Guidry and tell him what I’d learned. But the kitten was sleeping so peacefully I didn’t want to disturb her.

Besides, Jessica Ballantyne’s predicament was so stupid and so human that I wanted to give her more time. While my fingers lay warm in the kitten’s fur, I thought about all the significant world events that have been instigated or foiled or screwed up by love. Napoleon and Josephine. Abelard and Héloïse. King Edward and Wallis Simpson. Princess Diana and Prince Charles and Camilla. Funny how those supposedly stiff Europeans are the ones willing to give up all they have for love, while supposedly less repressed Americans—think Bill Clinton with Monica, Gary Hart with Donna Rice, Wilbur Mills with Fanne Foxe—give up all they have for sex. Not even grown-up sex either, but immature, trivial, banal sex.

Ken Kurtz wasn’t a national leader, but he had developed something of international significance, something worth the FBI’s interest, something that had caused a man’s murder. Jessica Ballantyne had been a respected scientist, a woman who had been tapped by the United States government first as a researcher and then as an undercover investigator. These two people had awesome intellects, and yet both of them were acting like high school kids blowing their SATs because love was turning their brains to mush. Maybe it was all that time they’d spent in Europe and Southeast Asia. If they’d stayed in the United States, they might be focused on sex instead of love.

And what about me? What was I focused on?

I was thirty-two years old, a healthy, normal woman with a healthy body and healthy desires, and cuddling this kitten was the closest thing I’d come to real intimacy with another living being in over three years. Ethan Crane was the answer to any woman’s best sex dream, but was that the way I wanted to go? When I decided to live again and love again, was it so I could go to a man’s house and have sex?

While my mind agonized over the question, my body rolled out of the hammock, causing Ella to wake up and wiggle in my hands.

I said, “It’s okay. We’re going inside now. There are some things I have to do. See, I have this date tonight.” She raised an eyebrow again, and I said, “A date is something humans do when they’re in heat. You cats just go ahead and do it—wham, bam, thank you, ma’am—but we humans can’t do that until we have dinner and talk first. That’s what a date is. Dumb, isn’t it?”

Inside, I left Ella exploring the apartment while I took a shower. I shaved my legs. I put a deep conditioner on my hair. I used an exfoliant to make my skin smooth. I decided to call Ethan and cancel the date. I thought I would use the kitten as an excuse—Somebody left this cat with me, and I have to take it to the SPCA. I was an astronaut on the liftoff pad having a genuine crisis of conscience or a bad case of first-time jitters.

I crawled into bed. Ella came crying for me, and I took her into bed with me. She was soft and warm against my side, and we slept for a couple of hours. When I woke up, the headache was gone. Was that a go-ahead sign from God? Or just a sign that my concussion was healed? Maybe both?

The evening with Ethan was now only seven hours away.

Naked, I carried Ella to my office-closet and put on a terry-cloth robe. I put on a Patsy Cline CD and sat down at my desk to enter information in my pet records. Ella came to my side and tried to jump up. I picked her up and let her sit in my lap for a few minutes while I worked, but then I put her down and stomped to the CD player and turned Patsy off. Sometimes innocent love is too sweet to stomach.

Somebody rapped on my French doors, and I pulled the robe closed and padded into the living room. Guidry was leaning with one hand on the door, looking calmly through the glass into my life. As if he had a right to drop by in the middle of the afternoon without calling. As if it didn’t matter that some people might like a little advance notice so they could dress before they had company.

I jerked open the door and scowled at him. He ignored me and sauntered inside, leaving me with the doorknob in my hand. He went to my refrigerator and opened it and took out a bottle of water. While he uncapped the bottle and drank half of it, I closed the door and went to stand at my bar. The soft back sides of my knees tingled. I wished he would kiss me again.

I said, “How nice to see you, Lieutenant. Could I offer you something to drink? Water, maybe?”

“Thanks, I already have some.”

He carried the bottle into the living room and set it on the coffee table, then dropped onto my green-printed couch. After a moment, I sat in the chair. Too late, I realized I was squeezing my knees together like a schoolgirl on her first make-out date. Only we weren’t making out and we weren’t going to, and I had to make that crystal clear before Guidry got the wrong idea. If he hadn’t already.

The kitten trotted into the living room and mewed at Guidry.

He said, “You have a kitten?”

I shook my head. “It’s just temporary. Somebody left it here. I named her Ella. Or that’s what I would name her if I were going to keep her.”

“Ella Fitzgerald?”

“Sure.”

“It bothers me that I knew it would be Fitzgerald.”

He took a sip of water while he eyed me.

He said, “We took Jochim Torres in today. None too soon, either. His car was packed to the roof and he was ready to leave town.”

When my mouth dropped, he shrugged. “The hundred grand was obviously a payoff.”

“But it was to Paloma.”

“That’s what Jochim said. But when I calmly pointed out to him that he had a record, and that we had good reason to believe he would take money to knock somebody off, he understood where I was coming from.”

“You didn’t tell him I’d told you about the money, did you?”

“I told him somebody at the bank reported it.”

“You lie to people you pick up?”

“All the time. It’s called being a homicide cop.”

I wondered if he had lied to me too.

As if he knew what I was thinking, Guidry’s lip tugged at the side in an almost-smile.

“According to Jochim, he was at home with his wife and kids and several grown cousins the night Ramón was killed, and he has no idea why an insurance man brought his sister a hundred thousand dollars in cash. You will not be surprised to learn that his wife and three men who claim to be his cousins all confirm his story.”

“You believe him?”

“I think they’re all lying through their teeth, but I don’t think Jochim Torres is a killer. He might cheat his brother-in-law out of his last dime, but I don’t think he would kill him.”

“Paloma believes Gilda killed Ramón.”

“She may be right.”

“Any leads on where Gilda may have gone?”

He shook his head. “She’s evaporated.”

I looked at the kitten and felt a little tug of disappointment. If Paloma wasn’t leaving town, she might want the kitten back. Well, so what? I didn’t plan to keep her.

“Will you take the money away from Paloma now?”

“The money will stay where it is until we know who killed Ramón Gutierrez, and so will Paloma and Jochim. If Jochim is innocent, the money belongs to Paloma.”

Ella settled on my bare feet and sent a nice warm wave up my ankles.

I said, “Any idea who the man was who delivered the money?”

He stood up. “Not a clue. Do you?”

“Not unless he’s the man I saw at Ramón’s funeral. Young, slight build, short dark hair, dark glasses. His suit looked too big for him, like maybe he’d lost weight recently. I almost thought I recognized him, but if I’ve ever seen him before he must have been heavier.”

He looked down at me for a long moment as if he wanted to talk about something else, then changed his mind.

“If you see him again, let me know. In the meantime, we’re focusing on finding the nurse. We’ve had some promising leads, and she can’t stay disappeared forever.”

Without waiting for my reply, he opened the French doors and left me with nothing but the sound of his snappy Italian loafers thudding down my steps.

At three-thirty, I got dressed and took Ella down to pee again on the beach. Before I left for my afternoon rounds, I got a disposable cardboard litter box from the stack I keep in the Bronco and shook a quarter-inch layer of clay into it. I put it in my bathroom and made sure Ella knew where it was. My head was pain-free, but I didn’t want to add more stress by taking her to a shelter just then.

It was also too soon for a run with Billy Elliot, so I sailed on by the Sea Breeze. I sailed by Ken Kurtz’s driveway too, with a mere neck swivel to look toward his house.

The marchers weren’t there. Either Guidry had told them to leave Kurtz alone or they’d all rushed off to pray in front of a screen door with a hole shaped like the outline of the Virgin Mary.

With most of the house hidden behind the row of areca palms, all I could see in my quick glance was the row of garage doors. In my imagination, I recalled the first time I’d gone up the walk beside the first garage and saw that huge fireplace through the clear glass. It had been a long walk. Seen from the outside, the long wall along the first garage seemed to be part of the west wing of the house, and I doubted that anybody else had noticed that it seemed too long.

An awareness suddenly plunked itself into my head, neat as a pin turning in a lock, and my skin prickled in astonishment that I hadn’t known it before. That nobody had known it, when it was right there staring us in the face.

Ethan had said the builders had been obliged to retain 30 percent of the original structure in order to avoid public scrutiny of the house plans. Suddenly I knew where that original structure was and why the four garages were so deep. The reason was that they weren’t. More than likely, all the garages were standard size, but there was about fifteen feet of space between their back walls and the back wall of the southern corridor where the wine room was, and I knew why.

Even moving slowly, I was finished with the afternoon pet visits in plenty of time to get ready for the evening with Ethan. I decided it would be better to put off taking Ella to a shelter until the next day. No sense in rushing it. I looked toward the Kurtz house again as I drove home, but there was nothing to see except a thin column of smoke rising from his chimney. I wondered how many times Jessica had driven past and looked toward the hedge. If what she’d said was true, her time was running out before she had to make a decision between the man she loved and the law she’d sworn to uphold.

My own time had run out too. I had to go to Ethan’s. I was a mature woman and it was time to act like one.

When I got home, I took one of the packets of emergency kitten food that I keep in the Bronco upstairs for Ella. She was waiting at the door for me, as if she’d known all along that I was coming home exactly at that time. She really was an exceptionally smart kitten.

I left her eating in the kitchen and took a quick shower to get rid of all the clinging pet hairs. I had left the bathroom door open, and Ella came in and watched me blow my hair.

I said, “I guess I’ll just let my hair hang straight. What do you think?”

She blinked at me in what seemed a female-to-female sign of approval.

I sprayed perfume on the backs of my knees and on my navel. I said, “Don’t get any ideas about that. It doesn’t mean anything. This is just a date. You remember I told you what a date is.”

Her ears twitched. She knew what the perfume meant. It was embarrassing to be so transparent.

She followed me into the office-closet, where I put on a black lace bra and bikini. I figured she knew what that meant too, but I was a grown woman and she was just a kitten, so who cared what she thought?

I put on a short black skirt with a white cotton turtleneck. I took off the white turtleneck and put on a black turtleneck. I took off the skirt and the turtleneck and got myself into an old dress that zipped up the back. I nearly broke my arm zipping it up, and when I stood in front of the mirror I remembered wearing it with Todd, and nearly broke my arm unzipping it. I stuffed my feet into high-heeled sandals for inspiration and stood in my underwear surveying my pathetic wardrobe. I hated everything I owned, and what I didn’t hate was either out of style or worn bald.

I said, “Everything I have is shit.”

Ella turned and gnawed on her back ankle, a sure sign that she thought humans were incredibly stupid.

My lower lip was beginning to push out in a little-girl sulk at the whole business of gift-wrapping myself to go eat dinner with a man. The kitten was right, it was too dumb to credit, especially when I wasn’t sure I even wanted the dinner or the man. I kicked off the sandals and pulled on a pair of clean jeans and the black turtleneck, then climbed back onto the heels because it was a date after all. Now that I felt more normal, I slicked my lips with pink gloss and grabbed my purse. I would eat Ethan’s food, but I would not go gooey just because he was gorgeous and I hadn’t had sex in four years.

I picked Ella up and pressed my nose to her nose. I said, “Don’t pee on anything. I don’t know when I’ll be home.”

On the way to Ethan’s place, I passed the Kurtz house again. The marchers hadn’t returned, and smoke was still curling from the chimney. Maybe Ken Kurtz was in his living room sitting in front of a roaring fire. Maybe Jessica was with him. Maybe they were discussing how they could escape both the FBI and BiZogen and ZIGI and run off to Argentina and take tango lessons and live happily ever after. Or maybe Gilda had come back and was administering the antidote to whatever Kurtz had, and maybe the two of them were planning to run away together.

Personally, I wasn’t going to run away with anybody to anywhere. I was simply going to have a quiet dinner with a man and come home. Maybe I would make out a little bit. Kiss some, touch some, but that was it. I ignored the proven fact that I had never wanted to stop if the kissing and touching were good. I was older, now, and wiser. At least older.

Ethan’s house turned out to be an ultra-modern cypress hidden behind a thick tangle of oaks and sea grape and palms on Fiddler’s Bayou, where John D. MacDonald used to live. When I eased the Bronco down Ethan’s shelled driveway, he was outside with a gray-muzzled bloodhound on a lead. The bloodhound was on the scent of something, with his head so low his eyes were hidden under drooped folds of skin and his ears were sweeping the ground. Ethan waved at me and then was jerked forward by the bloodhound.

I slid out of the Bronco and yelled, “What’s he trailing?”

Ethan grinned. “Ghosts, I think. I’ve seen him go hard on a trail that ended up at a rock.”

I went over and stood beside Ethan and watched the hound sniff the ground. With his liver-and-tan coat, he cut a fine figure. The hound, not Ethan. Except for my high heels, Ethan was dressed in pretty much the same clothes I wore.

I said, “I didn’t know you had a dog.”

“Something else I inherited from my grandfather. He always had bloodhounds, wouldn’t even think of any other dog. Sam is the last. He actually did a little bit of police tracking when he was young, but he’s ten now.”

He didn’t need to add that a ten-year-old bloodhound won’t be around much longer.

I said, “He looks healthy and happy.”

“Yeah. I think he misses my granddad, though.”

And right then I decided that I might not leave after dinner after all.

We went inside after Sam found his quarry, which was a rotted knot of oak buried in dead leaves. Ethan praised him liberally and gave him plenty of time to climb the curving steps to the front porch, then held the door for Sam and me. We went into a large round room with a dark wood floor and mostly glass walls. With the exception of a couple of curved walls that I assumed hid bathroom and closets, the entire house was one big room. With soft uplights illuminating the green foliage against the glass, it was like being in a snug tree house.

I said, “Wow. This is fantastic.”

“Thanks. My brother built it. He’s a genius.”

The kitchen was marked by curved cabinets and black polished countertops, and a bed with tall pilasters draped with sheer white linen announced the bedroom. A grouping of white linen chairs and sofas sat around a white shaggy rug. A glass-topped dining table flanked by Japanese benches sat on another white shaggy rug. A clear glass vase of paperwhite narcissus was in the middle of the table—not a poinsettia plant like ordinary people all over the country had, but paperwhite narcissus. I mean, how cool is that?

Leaving a discreet trail of drool on the dark floor, Sam drooped over to an elevated dog bed and crawled into it with a contented sigh.

Ethan tossed a paper towel on the floor and skated it along Sam’s drool trail.

“Want some wine?”

Of course I wanted wine. I wanted to sit on the white linen sofa and drink wine in that enchanted room for the rest of my life. Ethan flipped on soft music and poured two glasses of red wine without even asking if I’d rather have white, which was somehow very satisfying. We sat on the white linen furniture and talked about bloodhounds and cypress houses and genius brothers, and I forgot that I was on a date.

After a while, Ethan went in the kitchen and clattered around for a while, and I carried my empty wineglass to the curved counter and watched him dish out steaming lasagna onto plates. A salad bowl of oil-coated greens sat on the counter next to salad plates, so I showed my domesticity by putting salad on the plates and carrying them to the table.

When we sat down, I said, “You cooked this?”

“Are you kidding? I bought it at Morton’s and heated it.”

“Oh, good. I was afraid you’d cooked it. I mean, not that I was afraid it wouldn’t be good if you cooked it, it’s just that everything else is so perfect I couldn’t stand it if you were a good cook too.”

I didn’t even care that he laughed. Dating was fun. I loved dating.

The lasagna was delicious, the salad was sublime, and dessert was chocolate-tipped strawberries, of which, so far as I’m concerned, there is no whicher.

I helped him clear the table and put away leftovers, and then he poured us teeny cups of very strong coffee to take with us to the white linen furniture grouping. The coffee was flavored with cinnamon and it was delicious too, but it wasn’t exactly romantic. It was more like something to give wine-drinking guests before they drive home. The music wasn’t romantic either. It was the kind of music you listen to when you’re working, the kind to keep you alert. Like a not-so-subtle announcement that romance wasn’t on Ethan’s mind.

I sneaked a quick look at my watch, which said it was close to midnight. I stood up and carried my cup to the kitchen counter.

I said, “I have to get up at four, so I’d better say good night.”

He said, “I’ll walk you to your car.”

Sam raised his head and thumped his tail goodbye as we went out the door, and for a moment I felt like falling on the floor and having a fine leg-banging tantrum. Here I’d worried all week about how I would handle the sex thing, and there wasn’t any sex thing. I’d been invited to dinner and that’s all I’d got. I hadn’t even been offered a choice, just like I hadn’t been offered white wine.

At the Bronco, I turned to Ethan and said, “It was a lovely evening. Thank you.”

He didn’t answer. Just put his hands on my arms and leaned down and kissed me, long and hard.

“Good night, Dixie. Drive safely.”

I poured myself into the driver’s seat and started the Bronco and backed out while Ethan stood in the headlights and watched me. I didn’t begin to breathe until I was on the street.

I was surprised my breath didn’t come out flaming.